


fervid as a flame

by lady_ragnell



Category: Killjoys (TV)
Genre: Aliens, Crack Treated Seriously, Don't copy to another site, Enemies to Having a Crush But Still Enemies, F/M, Other, See notes for warnings, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-05 18:51:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20278111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: The Lady brings Fancy Lee on board her ship in order to needle Khlyen, but she finds that she's the one who's perturbed.Or, the one where Fancy Lee's biceps save Westerley.





	fervid as a flame

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** this being a fic about the Lady, she casually mentions things like torture and genocide and murder and rape and memory erasure. None of this is detailed, but it is casually mentioned and thought to be completely reasonable by the viewpoint character.
> 
> I have ended up in conversations with two different people in the past week (hi, Sovin and Scribe, no doubt the only two people reading this fic!) about how Fancy is definitely the Lady's favorite, so of course I decided to write this over the course of about two hours while the next episode was airing and jossing every last sentence of this. My life choices.
> 
> The title is, of course, from "What Is This Feeling?" from Wicked.

She brings Fancy Lee on board at first, quite simply, because she hopes it will bother Khlyen. There's a gap on her guard roster that needs filling, so when she looks for a replacement, he's a natural choice. He's competent, and as long as she keeps him away from the RAC and its philosophies, he's very safe. He's already proved that he's competent under her control, when Khlyen was their intermediary.

Now, she puts him on duty when she's calling Khlyen to answer a few questions, and enjoys watching Khlyen flinch when he sees him. Khlyen is so much weaker, without the green in his veins. Fancy Lee is too, of course, but he hardly had time to get used to his strength. It was all Khlyen was for a long time.

“Do you enjoy the newest member of my guard?” she asks when she's dismissed Fancy and her other guards. “I thought you'd enjoy a familiar face.”

“And if he remembers me? I should be a pretty strong trigger for his memories.”

She scoffs. “I can control him, just like I can control you.”

“And if he brings Yala here, or her friends? They might come looking for him.”

A pathetic attempt at baiting her. If Yalena hasn't come looking for Khlyen, she has no reason to come for this man. No one does, in fact. It's what makes him so appealing as torture for Khlyen. “Let them come,” she says. “But I don't think they will.”

*

Fancy Lee is interesting. Not as fun as Khlyen, of course, but she does remember him. He needed so little encouragement to be cleansed of his emotions the first time. Cleansing him of his past life was a little harder, but he lets go of his emotional attachments, everything except his precious RAC. Even without the strength of the green, he's an efficient guard, and she keeps him close partly because Khlyen's discomfort amuses her and partly because he's less stupid than most humans.

There's something aesthetically pleasing about him too, she muses upon reflection, after a week or two in close quarters with him. She's coming to understand, with some distaste, that her human eyes find some things and bodies more interesting to look at than others. She looks at Fancy Lee almost as often as she looks at the picture of some kind of domesticated animal that was on the PDD of this body's last owner.

“Fancy,” she says about a week in, when Khlyen isn't around and his fellow guards have been dismissed. “Are you happy here?” It's not a question she cares about with anyone else, but it seems to matter for him, and sometimes she indulges this body's instincts to see where they take her.

“Of course I am,” he says, sounding puzzled.

Damn. Of course he is. He thinks she's one of their stupid Qreshis who think they have power when they can't begin to touch what she can do, the owner of the factories, and he thinks he's the kind of person who would be honored by that. She's satisfied that however strong his mind is, there's no glimmer that he might have memories of his life, but she's also obscurely annoyed that she can't have real honesty. It's just because she owned him, for such a short time. She used to know his every thought and reaction. That's the only reason she could have for wanting to know what he thinks of anything.

“Good. Dismissed,” she says, and can't describe what follows when she's alone as anything but sulking.

It does help, for some stupid reason, to look at the picture of the domesticated animal.

*

Khlyen hates her, but he answers her questions without her forcing him to, because he thinks he can change her or manipulate her. He's too obvious, without the subtlety of the green, but that just makes it pathetically easy for her to get answers.

She calls him to her, dismisses her guards, and watches him for a moment. “I've told you already,” he says. “I don't know any more about where the boy Jaq is. You just have to wait for him to find Yala and her friends.”

“I'm not here to ask you about the Firstborn. That plan is working out quite well.” She drums the body's fingers against a table. It's an obscurely satisfying sensation. “I want a body, but I don't think I want to take it, even if it's stronger than this one. What does that mean?”

Khlyen sounds a little choked when he answers. “Wanting in what sense?”

“I don't know, your bodies have too many confusing chemical signals. I like it when this body is in the same room as me, and when I get to look at it.”

He thinks this is funny, the worm. She'll show him just how funny it isn't once he answers. “I believe,” he says, voice unsteady, “that you're referring to attraction.”

“Oh. Sex.” She wrinkles her nose with disgust. Wonderfully expressive, human faces. They'd have to be, to go with all their stupid emotions. And all the stupid things they do with their bodies. She's experienced sex, of course. Humans have a lot of it, for pleasure as much as to continue their species. But wanting it? That seems inconvenient. “I suppose I'll have him killed, then.”

*

She doesn't. She looks at Fancy Lee, thinks about ordering his partner on the guard to shoot him on the spot, and doesn't do it.

And worse, Khlyen seems to _know_ that she hasn't done it. He's not insolent enough to smirk, but she can't stop him looking like he knows something. She tortures him a little, to make herself feel better, but even then, he looks superior, and for once, he might be. It shouldn't be hard to kill Fancy. He's fragile meat and bone like the rest of them, and it's only coincidence that his meat is formed into shapes her body finds pleasing.

She asks his opinion twice more and almost sends him out the airlock in the humiliation that follows, but she doesn't do it.

*

Khlyen starts boring her, so it only seems logical to give Fancy his memories back. Maybe he'll be less interesting when he's not her loyal servant anymore. She generally doesn't have patience for those she can't control.

“You bitch,” he says at the end of a lot of language that she supposes would shock someone who was interested in petty human blasphemy. “What, you want me to watch it all because you think it's funny?”

“Maybe,” she says, pondering the matter. It would make more sense than sex.

Fancy spits. She freezes him in place with his collar after that, of course, but still, it's almost exhilarating. Khlyen thinks he can manipulate her, and he tries his best to stay calm and in control, to pretend he still has the protection of the green. Fancy just hates her with all the passion of his humanity. She's seen it in memories so many times, but experienced so little of it first-hand.

In a few more weeks, there won't be any more human hatred. Her children, of course, are going to be better than her species was before. They're going to feel, and remember feeling, but they won't be human. For the first time, she wonders if that will be a loss. She can't keep Fancy Lee as some kind of pet. The atmosphere won't keep him alive.

“I could cleanse your memory again,” she says, thinking out loud. That silences him. He's not afraid of her, but he is afraid of that. Interesting. “You'd be happy, for these last few weeks.” Maybe she'd even allow herself to understand human sex, and hope it gets the want out of her human body. She could make it so he was quite happy to do that.

But then again, that doesn't seem right. There's no point in giving him his memories and taking them away again. He's more interesting as himself, somehow.

“Why don't you just kill me?” he asks when she lets too much time pass.

“You're too interesting,” she says, and leaves him to take care of business.

*

Every time she comes back, he hates her just as much, and it's intoxicating.

*

She could let him go and make him fly far, far away, so by the time her children have crawled their way across the galaxy, he'll be long dead. Human lives are short, after all.

She could keep him in this ship, in this atmosphere, as long as he lives, as a monument to a bygone species, though she doubts he'd oblige her by living for very long.

She could take his body for her own, and hope that it silences the attraction.

While she thinks, she stalls, and Khlyen smirks, and the people of Westerley still breathe.

*

She lets Fancy Lee escape in the end, and not even to reel him back in the way she did Yala and her friends. She should go after him. He knows too much now, and his very breath is a risk.

She could restart the terraforming efforts on Westerley, where he no doubt is. It would be a very easy, impersonal way to kill him.

Instead, she halts them. She knows it spells her undoing, but this body will not harm Fancy Lee, and the feelings, the memories, are so enjoyable that she doesn't want to switch. He's made Westerley uninhabitable for her species, so she picks up her operation, frees Westerley and leaves it to itself. There are more hospitable places. She's only lost a few months of work, and she can always kill Yala and her friends, find the Firstborn, somewhere safely away from these annoying emotions.

And if she feels a little regret leaving Fancy behind, that's for her to know.


End file.
